NFS advanced settings for ESX/ESXi

Netapp has this wonderful Best Practices document available online, which is well worth the read. It used to include the CLI commands but this has been transferred to a new document.

As part of the best practices of an ESX/ESXi installation , you need to change some settings for NFS. I keep forgetting which ones they are, so this a reminder to myself (and anyone that reads this blog ;-) )

The easiest thing to do, is to start up the Remote Tech Support (SSH) service in the security profile, SSH to the host, and copy/paste this into the SSH window:

/usr/sbin/esxcfg-advcfg -s 30 /Net/TcpipHeapSize 

/usr/sbin/esxcfg-advcfg -s 120 /Net/TcpipHeapMax 

/usr/sbin/esxcfg-advcfg -s 10 /NFS/HeartbeatMaxFailures 

/usr/sbin/esxcfg-advcfg -s 12 /NFS/HeartbeatFrequency 

/usr/sbin/esxcfg-advcfg -s 5 /NFS/HeartbeatTimeout 

/usr/sbin/esxcfg-advcfg -s 64 /NFS/MaxVolumes

Note that the last setting says MaxVolumes: 64. The default is set to 8, which means that the maximum number of NFS volumes is 8 by default. Setting the maximum to 64 works for ESX 4.x, but used to be 32 for ESX 3.x. ESX 5.x can even go to 128.

 If you want to follow what VMWare says instead of the Netapp Best Practices, you can set the TCPIP Heap Size to 32 in ESX4/5(see here).

Update for 5.1:

/usr/sbin/esxcfg-advcfg -s 32 /Net/TcpipHeapSize
/usr/sbin/esxcfg-advcfg -s 128 /Net/TcpipHeapMax
/usr/sbin/esxcfg-advcfg -s 10 /NFS/HeartbeatMaxFailures
/usr/sbin/esxcfg-advcfg -s 12 /NFS/HeartbeatFrequency
/usr/sbin/esxcfg-advcfg -s 5 /NFS/HeartbeatTimeout
/usr/sbin/esxcfg-advcfg -s 256 /NFS/MaxVolumes